“It's actually not the greatest risk that the network isn't there and that the technology isn't available. It's that the operator doesn't know that that capability is being manipulated by the adversary. … If you have an operator that isn't trained in those baselines, they're going to increasingly rely on that technology and be increasingly vulnerable to the very attack surface that that technology creates.”
Irregular Warfare Podcast · Geopolitics & World Affairs · November 2026
Context
Asked whether Marines should hand more tasks to machines, Haelig says troops must keep manual baseline skills. The bigger danger, he argues, is a screen that stays on but feeds the operator manipulated data.
Transcript
We're not going to give that all up to robots to do for us.
Right. Yeah, these are Marines enabled by technology. Right. Go ahead.
…exquisite or electronic or super intelligent capabilities. They might just be degraded. They might be denied. And the operator needs to understand how to do those things manually. Something else that a colleague of mine have been looking at in terms of some of these risks of what the next generation soldier, sailor, Marine Airman, what have you, looks like and how they use these tools is that it's actually not the greatest risk that the network isn't there and that the technology isn't available. It's that the operator doesn't know that that capability is being manipulated by the adversary. And the smarter that the operator is with that capability and what it should be doing in terms of the military function, the better equipped they're going to be to say, hey, wait a minute, maybe our data is being manipulated by the adversary. Maybe this communication isn't telling me what I need to hear. Maybe there's something off here. Let me fall back to the training, these baseline tactics…
Yeah, Carlton, we tell Marines today that you have to be able to operate effectively when the screen goes blank. Marines understand that kind of language. So along with introducing all these advanced technologies, we maintain a strict focus on basic warfighting skills, physical fitness, land…
A small unit leader has only so much training time. My experience as an infantry platoon leader many years ago was that it took a full calendar year just to get an infantry company live fire ready, maybe with some motors involved. We weren't thinking about overlaying drones or SI or cyber attacks…
Yeah, we're doing a little bit of both, Kyle. Cognitive overload is an important consideration. And so we're working to use the capabilities that are being made by advanced technologies to enable Marines, as Carlton Haelig, to give them more time to think, to use what the machines don't have, which…
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